Meaning and semiotics

Member lesson

Visual metaphor

Lesson 4 of 9 in Meaning and semiotics.

WIRED By Design: How Metaphors Make Us Love Some Designs and Not Others · WIRED
Lesson

A visual metaphor en.wikipedia.org carries a quality from one thing to another using pictures instead of words. One half is the source, whose properties are being lent out, and the other is the target, which is being described. Charles Forceville's Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising, published in 1996, is where most study of it begins. A campaign example kept in the reference literature is a very large dog beside a very small food bowl, captioned more power, less consumption, in which the dog is a car.

the thingyou are sellingthe thingeveryone knowsone shared property, and only onewiden the overlap and the metaphor stops meaning anything
Two unrelated domains joined by one shared property, which is the whole metaphor.
A poster in red, black and off-white. A sharp red triangle drives in from the left into a large white circle set against a black field. Cyrillic lettering across the sheet reads Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, and small red and white bars are scattered through both the white and black areas.
El Lissitzky's 1919 poster in which a red wedge drives into a white circle. The shapes carry the whole message: one force breaking into another.Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. El Lissitzky, 1919.Wikimedia Commons/Public domain
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  1. Question 1, locked

    What makes a visual metaphor work?

    • The two things share a structure, not just a look
    • The two things are from the same category
    • The comparison is stated in the copy as well
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The thing whose qualities are being borrowed. The lion, the mountain, the wedge.”

    • Signifier
    • Sign
    • Counter
    • Source
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The thing being described by the borrowing. Usually your product, usually unshown.”

    • Live symbol
    • Buta
    • Oppositional reading
    • Target

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